I would like to suggest, to all of us who are fortunate enough to have health insurance, that it is important to look closely at health care bills to make sure that we are not being overcharged by our health care providers, and not to just rely on our insurance carriers to do this for us.

Just suppose when you get your bills that you are paying for those services yourself rather than the insurance company. Don’t hesitate to call providers and ask them for an explanation of bills you receive.

This is one thing we can do to help lower our health care costs and our insurance premiums as well.

I think it must be noted, in this presidential election cycle, the lack of advertising dollars flowing into out state from the national campaigns. This being due to a lock on our vote for the Republican candidate.

My point being that the rate of return that our state sees on any money donated to national political parties is paltry at this point, and regardless of your political affiliation, I encourage you to give money to your local and state political parties and candidates, which hopefully keeps most of that wealth in South Carolina for South Carolina.

The current economic crisis has been spurred by deregulated greed of mortgage lenders, dubious decisions by home buyers to accept adjustable rate mortgages without reading the fine print, and global bankers who were more than happy to overlook the underlying structural problems of these loans and spin them into investment vehicles worth many times the initial value of the paper- but the bottom line here is the problem is a problem of over extension of debt.

Bad mortgage debt in this country is just another example of how we have been living beyond our means for decades, building up government and consumer debt at unprecedented levels.

Before we come out of the current recession would be a good time for South Carolinian’s to take a good look at how they are living. To practice buying locally and regionally as much as possible, to work on getting out of debt except for a mortgage(No More Credit Card Debt), to establish peer to peer loan operations within the state so when people need to borrow money, the interest(i.e. wealth) does not flow out of the state, and to greatly reduce the amount of oil we import.

If doubling the national debt happens to staive off a recession now, we will pay for it down the road, and it is time for South Carolina to start preparing for the future.